Daniel Rose - Larry's Kidney, Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China

“What, you’re quoting Confucius now?”

“Hey, I keep my ear to the ground. Bottom line, who are we to judge if she’s the real McCoy or not? The only thing I know for sure is that she’s spending a lot of effort to please me, and if she keeps that up, I’ll end up fat and happy. Does that make sense to you?”

“It makes Larry sense to me.”

“Thank you, I think,” he says. “It’s like what my futha used to say: ‘What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.’”

“Larry!” I say as the fridge squawks, dying yet another death. “Did you hear what you just did? You just quoted your father.”

“I know. I’m speechless.”

But not for long. He picks up the portable fan from the table and holds the grille against his lips. “You made my day, Dan.” He puts it down.

“You’re welcome. So can I set you up with a wheelchair at the airport?”

“Right. Like I’m gonna accept a wheelchair. Dan, think about the stories you have to tell when you get home: How good a character would I be if I did everything you asked? Who’d want to hear about me if I was the type to take a wheelchair?”

“So really you’re doing it for me, as you have been all along.”

“An argument could be made, yes. Just don’t act like you didn’t get something out of this, too, don’t forget.”

“And that would be what?” I ask.

“You didn’t get smoke rings puffed in your face by Chinese soldiers this time.”

We exchange a small smile. But that’s the most we’re going to get or give.

“Want an update on my latest lawsuit, nuffing to do with caviar?”

“No thanks.”

“Didn’t think so.”

So long. So long. We shake hands. No question of a hug; I’ve had plenty with the others.

“Get that goldfish a bigger bowl, will you please?” I say.

“Right. And you check both ways before crossing the street.”

I’m out the door, down the elevator, crossing the silent lobby where the usual patients shuffle sadly about in their dingy Yankee uniforms. I’m going to miss this Giant Mushroom of Hope and Dread, with its glittering marble floors and carpets of broken calligraphy. I leave the hospital for the last time, followed by a maid who polishes off my footsteps so there’s no trace of me left. No sooner am I down the steps to the sidewalk than Abu putters up on his motor scooter, wearing childlike woolen mittens, badminton rackets in a pouch over his shoulder like a quiver of arrows. He’s unhappy because his father’s in such dire straits, but he insists on taking me to the train station, my suitcase on my lap, so I can make my way back to Beijing.

“Come visit me in America,” I say when he drops me off at the station. “We’ll play badminton in my backyard.”

“Or come to Pakistan,” he says, “for an excellent holiday.”

Well, that’s maybe not the first place I’d go for an excellent holiday just now, but who knows? We shake hands good-bye. After I walk into the station, it occurs to me that he still had his mittens on when we shook. With that single gesture, that lack of skin contact, I receive the information that we are not deeply befriended. Larry got the kidney before Abu’s dad did, and besides, there are political differences. If America were to find itself in a war with Pakistan, Abu would hesitate only long enough to say a prayer before slitting my throat. Sunny-side-up dude I may still be, after all that’s happened here these past two months, but a dumb one I am not.

Or am I ever.

It is only when the cold season comes that we know the cypress to be evergreen.

Home sweet home. It’s good to be back among so many Western faces, so much English lettering. Except I’m not in America but Beijing, which only feels like home after I’ve spent seven weeks in Shi. Suddenly I’m filled with nostalgia for scruffy old Massage Central with its repainted cabs and screeching bikes. I have a few hours to kill before I have dinner with Jade and then proceed to the airport, so I decide to pay my respects to the rooftop of my old luxury hotel. Great view from up there, of my life if not of the city. Then I decide to pay a visit to Alfred, the bow-tied dean from the Shabbos service who asked me to keep in touch. We greet each other like old friends in the rotunda of the foreign-language institute, but when I start to debrief him, he shushes me with a finger to his lips and without another word walks me to the institute’s cafeteria for a snack. Only there, amid the bustle of scattered diners, does he speak again, telling me that the temple has been praying for Larry every Friday night since I left Beijing-a Misheberah, prayer for those in need of healing.

“Really?” I say, pushing my plastic tray along the rack. “I’m touched. I wasn’t aware that was going on.”

“If I may be so bold, Daniel,” he says, using an ice-cream scoop to dig out a healthy dollop of potato salad. “I daresay there are many things of which you are not aware.”

I want to know what he means.

“It’s okay now, it worked out safely,” he tells me. “We did have a few scary days there, however.”

Now I really want to know what he means.

“Daniel,” he says, “you’re a reasonably attractive man.”

“Okay,” I say, taken aback.

“But then again, I’m a man of sixty-four,” he continues. “That is to say, I’m not a woman of twenty-four. Do you honestly think you’re so irresistible that young Chinese women trip over themselves for the pleasure of squiring you around?”

“I’m not sure I understand,” I say, but even as I’m saying the words, I’m feeling a trickle of the old charley horse or something related, some echo of something I’ve purposefully kept muted in my musculature the past two months.

“Perhaps you understand more than you think you do,” he says, selecting a bowl of crimson Jell-O.

“What do you mean?”

A pause as he pays the cashier. “You’ve been very lucky these past two months,” he says.

“I’ve been excruciatingly lucky. I’m very grateful. So?” I follow his backside through the semicrowded cafeteria. “You’re saying I’m luckier than I know?”

The whole way across the room, the echo inside me is turning into heat, which is turning into an itch. In my chest, which I can’t scratch because I’m carrying a tray. I’m suddenly very uncomfortable.

“What are we talking about?” I repeat as we find a table.

He’s opaque as he pulls out a chair and sits down, then fiddles in the briefcase at his feet. “Daniel, do you not read the papers? Are you not aware that there are reports almost every day about the amount of surveillance that goes on in this country?”

My knees itch madly. I feel like a monkey, wanting to scratch everywhere.

“Look, right here,” Alfred says, producing a couple of newspapers. “Just this morning a report that over half the foreign journalists based in China have been spied on or detained. Don’t get me wrong, it’s always been bad, but since the world began focusing its spotlight on Beijing with the Olympics, it’s become, let us say, pervasive.”

“Okay-okay, I get it,” I say, even though I’m uncertain what I get. I’m too busy clawing at the itch surfacing in the unlikeliest places: my eyebrows, my armpits.

“And you’re an American writer poking around on your own; of course they’d want to know what you’re up to. Not to say that you’re not perfectly attractive on your own merits, but I mean, c’mon, Daniel: twenty-four?”

“I’m trying my best to misunderstand you,” I say, tongue-tied. Now it’s the small of my back that’s itching.

“Don’t take it so hard,” he says, gauging my reaction closely. “It’s in the culture-a tradition of deep strategic thinking that’s as old as the country itself. In their ancient book The Art of War, written in the sixth century B.C., they talk about the importance of placing spies in the opposite camp to learn what they were up to. China is a nation that takes its espionage very seriously.”